Play-to-Earn NFT Game MonkeyBall Raises over $3 Million Funding

MonkeyBall, a play-to-earn gaming platform has added another substantial sum of $3 million (roughly Rs. 22.4 crore) in a fresh funding round. Several venture capital firms as well as angel investors participated in the funding round including Solana Capital, Republic, NFX, and iAngels among others. The investment comes at a time many games based play-to-earn model have caught the attention of investors. Play-to-earn games allow gamers to gather NFT collectibles and crypto tokens while playing. These collectibles and tokens can be traded for profits.

MonkeyBall is an arcade football game featuring larger than life monkeys. With each victory, the players get awarded Solana tokens.

“When a match ends, the in-game currency token, MonkeyBucks ($MBS), is split between the winning team, the stadium owner, and the spectators who rooted for the winning team,” the official game website explains.

Longhash, CMS, Jump Capital, Youbi, Morningstar Ventures, Banter Capital, Ascentive Assets, MarketAcross, Node Capital, ZBS Capital, Metaversal, Collider, BFF, and 6th Man Ventures are among other investors to have invested in the game, a report by CryptoPotato revealed.

“Play-to-earn is an exciting and quickly growing application for blockchain and NFTs, but it's not easy to find games with great production quality. The first play-to-earn game to truly become mainstream is still in the future, and we are hard at work to realize that future for MonkeyBall,” Oren Langberg, Head of Marketing, Monkeyball said in a statement.

In recent days, many such blockchain-based play-to-earn and move-to-earn games have tickled the interest of investors.

For instance, earlier this month, NFT game Genopets raised $8.3 million (roughly Rs. 62 crore) in a seed funding round. The game was introduced earlier this year, and it rewards players for the steps they take in their real lives.

Earlier in October, Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis – that created the popular NFT game Axie Infinity raised $152 million (roughly Rs. 1,134 crore) from at least six crypto and blockchain investors in a Series B funding round.

As per a report by research platform DappRadar, the play-to-earn movement has been one of the key forces behind the rapid growth of the NFT gaming space.